Description
Book SynopsisThis is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of Englands universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journeyfrom schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked
Table of ContentsIntroduction PART I: INSTITUTIONS 1: Shared backgrounds and cultural pathways: from school to university 2: Young male bodies and a community in costume PART II. INTERTEXTS 3: Scholar-soldiers take on Roman comedy: Role-playing as the miles glorious 4: From bitesize morsels to Thyestean feasts: The competitive world of Senecan revenge tragedy PART III. INDIVIDUALS 5: Proof is in the performance: Dramatic overtures to patrons and employers 6: University drama in print: Curating your image and shaping your story Epilogue: A Coming of Age
